


A Savior's Child

by LovesFrogs



Series: Unrelated Irondad Drabbles [2]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Dads are superheroes, Dads don't need to become superheroes, F/M, Fatherhood, I just have feelings about Tony and Thanos, Parent Tony Stark, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Reflection, Tony Feels, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark-centric, in preparation for endgame, inspired by MatPat, tony stark retirement, tony would be a great dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-22 22:54:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18537127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LovesFrogs/pseuds/LovesFrogs
Summary: Nebula and Tony talk about her father during their return to earth. Tony comes to a realization he didn't expect.





	A Savior's Child

Nebula was looking out at the stars when Tony found her. She turned to face him expectantly, not one to waste any words.

“Tell me about Thanos,” he said. “We’ll beat him somehow, but we have to know everything we can. How long has he been planning this? What was he like when you were young?”

She looked at him for a long moment, some strange emotion flickering behind her eyes. Finally she responded, but it wasn’t with an answer. “That boy on Titan. Was he your son?”

“He was my…” Tony sighed and came up beside her. “He was my protege, my apprentice, if you will. He…” and what else was there to say, really. No matter how much either of them had wanted it, that was all their relationship had had time to become. Tony turned away and trailed off into a silence that stretched a little too long to be comfortable.

“Even at the beginning, Thanos only really fought for one thing,” said Nebula. Tony looked back to meet her unreadable expression. “He wanted the galaxy to avoid the fate of his home planet; you know, the overpopulation that led to poverty and extinction. But it didn’t always consume him like this. When I was a child, even the thought that he might kill Gamora would have been ridiculous. He loved her, more than he ever did me. He was simply preoccupied with the fate of the universe around him. But as the years went by he became distant and obsessed, leaving us to fight for the greater good more often than not, until it came to this.” She indicated the window, out of which thousands mourning planets floated through the darkness. “He has tried to save the universe from itself at the cost of the very people he was fighting to protect in the first place. He will not stand for long now. There is nothing left for him.”

As she spoke, Tony tried to see his enemy through the eyes of the alien’s daughter. Thanos from her point of view wasn’t a monster, not always. He had been her father. Tony was almost reminded of Howard, who had never made enough time for family in between running the family business and keeping the military happy. But instead of that, Thanos walked away from them to continue his twisted work of “saving” the universe, justifying his absence and indifference with the burden that no one had asked him to take up, until he could no longer give it up at all. A father who claimed to care might almost have been worse than one who just didn’t.

That wasn’t the story of Howard, Tony realized. This was the story of himself.

What were Pepper’s complaints against him every time they had broken up? He was too preoccupied with being the earth’s protector, he was always putting himself in danger for no reason and never had enough time to spend with her. If he wanted a child, the kid would need a father who was their own hero, not some aloof savior of the whole planet.

What had Ultron been, if not this? Tony had created a protection that he thought would save the earth, had in the process accidentally sacrificed JARVIS, who was nearly a part of his family. And instead of saving the planet everything had gone horribly wrong, leaving Tony with nothing but regret. The Infinity Gauntlet was Thanos’ Ultron. A quick fix that promised everything and took everything in return.

Now Tony had lost something much more important than even his old AI.

“What was it like,” he asked her around a sudden lump in his throat, “being the child of a ‘hero’?”

Nebula looked away. “We were a small population who supported him,” she said. “Everyone told me how proud I must be, how wonderful it would be to have such a father. It was impossible to live up to their opinions of him, and after a while I no longer wanted to. I hate him. No matter what everyone said, he was always gone and he never once truly saved me from anything. I would rather have been the daughter of a loving criminal or an impoverished traveller any day.”

Tony nodded slowly. Thanos had driven away his family through the same ways that Tony continued to hurt his. It was like hearing about his worst possible future through the eyes of Pepper or Peter, sometime down the line. 

“He couldn’t hold the weight of the universe, and it destroyed him,” he muttered. “I understand.”

Nebula looked up, straight into his eyes. “Yes,” she said, holding his gaze, “I think you do.”

Tony would fight this battle because it needed to be fought, because it was personal, and because Strange must have saved him for a reason. But Tony would remember this night well.

And after the battle was over, while Nick Fury negotiated with the UN and Bucky Barnes took up an Avengers post and Scarlet Witch kissed Vision on the mouth, Tony went home. He still tinkered in his workshop, he made new phones and prosthetics and generally anything that caught his attention, outside of weapons. He learned that the hardest part of living was living with the fact that he could not and should not try to save everything.

There were days when the guilt felt like a physical itch all over his skin. His left arm shook and he would watch that week’s horrors on the news over and over again, and he _knew_ there was a better way to stop it somewhere, if he could just find it. There were other days where the Avengers assembled and he didn’t do that anymore, but he watched with his heart in his throat as the best teenager in Queens squared off against insurmountable odds.

But there were also days where his new baby girl looked up at him and smiled, and his heart just melted in a way he never would have expected once upon a time. Sometimes Pepper came home from a business trip and he kissed her sweetly and called her “Miss Potts”. (“That’s Mrs. Stark to you,” she’d told him the first time, and he’d smiled for an hour.) One day Peter came swinging over with his backpack as fast as his webs would carry him so that Tony could be the first one he told about going to MIT. He couldn’t have been prouder.

Looking at Thanos had been like looking into a mirror, or looking into the future. But Tony learned better.

Nebula came to visit every once in a while, her and her guardian friends. They all came back two years after Thanos had been defeated, and were met by the Avengers on the roof of Stark tower. She took all of ten minutes to seek Tony out where he was wrestling Morgan into her high chair for lunch.

“I’m glad to find you here,” she said. Tony turned around to find her smiling.

“I’ve been working on it,” he told her. “Morgan won’t be the daughter of some savior or billionaire or hero. She’ll just have this old man here to drag her around.” 

“That’s all she’ll really need anyway,” Nebula said.


End file.
